If you wanted to get the text string representing the day or the month, you can use the httpd_util module (which contains all sorts of useful things that should be moved to the calendar and string modules:

If you are wondering what to use when you are using the Epoch (seconds) representation of the given date, then you should consider transforming your number of seconds to date, and then use this recipe. See recipe TimeEpochToTime to pass from seconds to dates.